I have been supporting Lemmy recently a lot and made posts about Lemmy that got big reach. Today, sadly the reddit account through which, I moderated a lot of subs and spent time on, comes to an end. The reason was because I spammed according to reddit, but the reality is that they have censored me because I was hurting Reddit.
Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well
I never thought this would happen, not that I didn’t completely expect it (but maybe not this soon and sudden), after all Reddit is known for censorship, and the fact that Reddit admins have absolute power over this website makes this believable. But part of me, misses that reddit account, it has been special to me, as I’ve spent countless of hours spending my personal time to moderate and improve communities that helped Reddit thrive. I moderated as many subs as over 25, many of them had atleast over 1k people, some as many as 200k if not more.
Before this happened, suspiciously, they banned r/LemmyMigration today early morning,
it remained banned for a few hours and returned back to normal (not weird at all). I thought that was a mistake, as the sub was back to normal unbanned, but it seems like the Reddit admins realized if they banned my sub, that would prove how they censor it, it can work against them. Now, it seems like they have realized that bringing my account down would be more effective, and stop me from possibly sharing how they censored my sub on other subs for example.
It’s a shame, and part of me is sad, everything I worked hard for was taken away by them all of a sudden. I wanted to bring some of my communities here, now everything is gone, and it feels more like starting from scratch (Or discuss with mods I am still in contact with, and get help to bring communities I was planning on bring here, but it certainly makes things harder, not giving up anyways, especially not after this).
BTW I have filled an appeal, but I don’t expect this to be reversed, this was planned by the Reddit admins and all they have to do is ignore my appeal, there is nothing more I can do to get my account back, and they just got rid of someone who was pinpointing some of their biggest flaws and potentially dangering their platform’s dominance in the “aggregation and discussion platforms” market.
A note to all refugees and ex-redditors here, or those who are planning to join Lemmy - See the power a centralized corporation like Reddit holds. With a decentralized alternative like Lemmy, you can host your own instance or join another one if you get censored, with lemmy, we can put more power back in the hands of the people.
I don’t have much else to say, moving on I will have to work with mods left that I do know through external platforms like Discord and try to bring some communities here. I hope this does not happen to any other moderator who have spend countless of hours helping Reddit in-directly like I did, somehow escaping such a suspension.
EDIT: There is some controversy in the comments if I actually spammed, I don’t think I spammed at all, I only made a post on r/ApolloApp, it became a hit so I cross-posted it to other third-party app subs, just so that it can hopefully reach out to the respective developers for them to possibly consider Lemmy in the wake of new reddit API changes.
I was also certainly not the only one mentioning alternatives like Lemmy on the r/Apolloapp or any other third-party app sub, in-fact many people were mentioning alternatives, though I was banned, also my community r/LemmyMigration as mentioned above was called spam (and was temporarily banned, but was weirdly brought back up just to put my account down later today afternoon) when it only had 2 posts today morning. To me, “spam” seems like it is only used as a cover up by Reddit, the real reason is that my posts, just like r/LemmyMigration, was about Lemmy, a competition to Reddit.
Also if it was really spam, as soon as I cross-posted my post from r/apolloapp to the other subs, the mods would have removed it well before they got a lot of attention, why didn’t they?
EDIT 2: A user called @danke has been spreading misinformation about me in the comments:
Just as you did on your newly created reddit alt, you’re painting this lie that you were banned for your tiny no-name subreddit and not for spamming this garbage on 11 different mobile app subreddits in quick succession. It’s truly like clockwork for sitebanned users to lie and omit these massive details.
This is a blatant lie, I mentioned about the cross-posts right IN THIS post: “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well”
As you can see, I made the post right here and on reddit, i never missed any details.
This is another good reason to stop using reddit. The internet used to have millions of active message boards for discussion of numerous topics. Reddit has essentially become one giant message board to rule them all. The world does not need this. Best to help decentralize the internet by promoting alternatives.
One of the reason reddit rose from these boards was persistence, boards were all over the place and no sureness if they will stay tomorrow. It seems reddit posts now have the same fate.
Delphi was pretty good. But it was also fairly persistent.
Just as you did on your newly created reddit alt, you’re painting this lie that you were banned for your tiny no-name subreddit and not for spamming this garbage on 11 different mobile app subreddits in quick succession. It’s truly like clockwork for sitebanned users to lie and omit these massive details.
dam, I feel a tad like an ass for deleting my reddit comments the way I did. Oh well, guess there’s no turning back now.
Edit: never mind, @danke@lemmy.ml seems to have made an account with the express purpose of making these comments, while OP is a 2Y old account, who posted the other day about helping redditors migrate over here. Idk what the actual truth of this situation is, but I’m inclined to lean towards OPs side of the story. I remember OPs reddit posts and they wheren’t “spam” from what I could tell, he just posted basically the same post to multiple subreddits and AFAIK he didn’t repeatedly post to the same subreddit multiple times.
Thank you for understanding man, I have no ill intention, I made a single post on r/ApolloApp, and cross-posted it to the other third-party app subs, to hopefully reach out to the respective devs so they can possibly consider Lemmy. It was not spamming in my opinion, if it ever was, the mods would have removed those cross-posts right away.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still skeptical on some of this, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. This seems like it could be a missunderstanding, either by you or the subreddit mods/admins. I’m sorry that happened to your reddit account, but I’m not yet convinced that its happening to everyone’s account. Regardless, I doubt reddit will stand by and let its users flock to lemmy in droves without a fight.
And any of this still does not justify or answer what happened with r/LemmyMigration as mentioned in the post, they just called the sub as “spam”, just to keep it banned for a few hours in the morning and bring it back. And the reality was that the sub has no more than 2 posts, how is that spamming?
Yea that part does seem super shady. Either way we are all better off here I think. Even if that part is not true(and I’m leaning towards it being true), it proves a point. Reddit(the company) has ultimate authority over all redditors, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Reddit is inclined to police their website in a way that promotes their own finantial interests and overprotects their company from real and perceived threats. It makes sense that they would at least have a more hardline attitude of their rules towards anyone who threatens their profit margin.
Yeah reddit sucks but this was a reasonable ban. I saw OP posting that all over the place and pinging devs to the point it looked suspiciously close to self promo. I’m surprised the ban didn’t happen earlier. It was pretty blatantly spam.
I respect your opinion, but I don’t agree. It was a single post on r/ApolloApp that was cross-posted to a few other communities, and if that was considered as spam, wouldn’t have the sub’s own mods removed it and let me know?
But a complete suspension from the whole website? This was more than just the given reason “spamming”.
It’s not my opinion. It’s literally in the site rules - https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043504051 Bullet point 2 in the second list. Bullet point 3 arguably also applies since lemmy could be said to be unrelated to the subreddits in which you were posting. And when site wide rules get broken then it’s the admins that step in, not subreddit moderators.
Edit: As for the self promo part I mentioned in my previous comment, that would fall under bullet point 2 of the first list in the link. While you may not actually have a stake in lemmy, your actions on reddit definitely made me suspicious that you did before I looked into lemmy more and learned who the the heads of the project are. It would have been easy for a mod or admin to have seem just your comments on reddit and assume the same thing.
I’m not saying I disagree with your motives but your actions were pretty clearly breaking long established rules.
There are plenty of other reasons to criticize reddit. Enforcing their existing rules is not one of them.
Again I don’t agree with this. Why?
I wouldn’t say Lemmy was completely irrelevant, and it was certainly not just me asking devs at r/ApolloApp to consider switching Reddit’s APIs to Lemmy’s thanks to the recent API news, this was totally relevent, here is another post from another user mentioning lemmy on the r/ApolloApp post.
If these other users mentioning alternatives are not banned, why was I?
Also as mentioned in the 3rd bullet point, if I am not sure, contact the mods right? The very same mods would have very well seen my posts, especially when it had a lot of upvotes, if that was actually considered as spam, they would have removed it.
The user you linked made a single post and a single comment on the topic. You spread a ton of posts and comments across several subreddits.
The subreddit mods might have reported you to the admins as a spammer - that’s what they do when they see someone breaking site wide rules. Like it or not, they are under no obligation to communicate with you about it beforehand. It’s also possible that none of the subreddit mods had an issue with it and you happened to be noticed by an admin who saw you were breaking the rules.
The user you linked made a single post and a single comment on the topic. You spread a ton of posts and comments across several subreddits.
I did cross-post it, and I think that is indeed what cross-posting is for.
The subreddit mods might have reported you to the admins as a spammer - that’s what they do when they see someone breaking site wide rules. Like it or not, they are under no obligation to communicate with you about it beforehand. It’s also possible that none of the subreddit mods had an issue with it and you happened to be noticed by an admin who saw you were breaking the rules.
If that’s true, they would have also removed my post, even if a one sub’s mod team missed it, I cross-posted it to a couple of other subs, did all of them just let my post grow and silently report to Reddit’s admins? No, I don’t think this is the case.
EDIT: As a long-time reddit moderator, I know what we would typically do if we saw spammers, we can report them as you said, but we also mainly (and first) remove their posts, but that did not happen across any of the subs I cross-posted to. And this does not explain what happened briefly with my r/LemmyMigration sub today morning either.
I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree. In my opinion posting the same thing across 11 subreddits (even as crossposts), pinging a bunch of other users, and making a lot of comments that mostly just said “move to lemmy” is excessive.
I’m not a mod of one of the subs so I can’t explain why they did or didn’t do something.
Again, I don’t necessarily disagree with your motives but you made yourself a really easy target for reddit.
Other users x-post like this all the time (cough e-girls cough) and literally nothing happens because it helps drive reddit viewership and ultimately ad views. If this violates anti-spam rules, then this is quite the conveniently selective enforcement.
True. That should result in bans too.
I saw on reddit that OP got unbanned which does indeed make the situation a lot more suspicious.
In the end spam comes down to what a person thinks is reasonable and as we have seen time and time again, that definition varies from person to person.
I literally mentioned about this in this post. Can you stop lying and spreading misinformation about me?
EDIT: Looks like posts from my account can’t be seen, but anyways, I have mentioned my cross-posts of my post on r/ApolloApp to the other third-party app subs right here “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well” in this post.
So no, I have mentioned all details in this post, I have not missed anything, this person is spreading misinformation about me.
In simple words, I cross-posted what I posted on r/ApolloApp to the other third-party app subs, that is not “spamming”, if it was ever considered against the rules, the moderators of these subs would have taken down my posts at the time, well before they grew.
EDIT: Looks like posts from my account can’t be seen, but anyways, I have mentioned my cross-posts of my post on r/ApolloApp to the other third-party app subs right here “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well” in this post.
So no, I have mentioned all details in this post, I have not missed anything, this person is spreading misinformation about me.
Yes, you did post on your ban-evasion account, so the content you linked has been shadowbanned. I’ll copy the last publicly accessible text for posterity, which very clearly demonstrates exactly what I stated about you omitting your cross-post spam activity:
My initative r/LemmyMigration was banned temporarily this morning for the same reason…“spamming”, then they suspiciously just unbanned it a couple hours later just to take my ex-account down.
The reality is that r/LemmyMigration had 2 posts, that was clearly not about spamming, but it’s about mentioning their competitiion.
If what you call as “spamming” is the only way we can encourage people to consider moving to lemmy and get off this hellhole, so be it.
What happened was they censored me because they realized I was supporting their competition, I was not merely spamming nonsense, I have been on reddit long enough, especially moderating several huge communities, that I know actually “spamming” will endanger my account, but yeah, “spamming” was a comfortable way to mask censoring me.
I deleted that post in like 5 minutes after posting it, because I missed some details that you took advantage of, me cross-posting my post from r/Apolloapp is actually linked in this post. See “Asking multiple third-party app devs consider Lemmy + Made the same post here as well” in this post right here? I would not have included that if I wanted to actually omit out info. Again stop spreading misinformation.
The post was removed (and the account is non-existing), do you know the reason for this?
Ban evasion. OP literally said “Reddit has permanently suspended my account”. That’s just asking for it.
Hmm interesting, they seem to be fast then, and it probably confirms a non-auto-removal (of the original account).
I am not sure, maybe they realized it’s me because others can’t seem to see my post, nor can I delete the account.
Look, I just wanted to share this post there on r/redditalternatives and delete my account, I obviously didn’t wanted to invade ban, now reddit is not even letting me delete my new account, it keeps making me reset password whenever I click at “delete account”.
Ever seen an only fans poster? Sometimes 50 or 60 of the same post to sub after sub after sub. Note THAT is spam, not OPs output. Why are the OF spammer allowed to stay and not OP?
Relevant trope: Wounded Gazelle Gambit
This is showing that they know about Lemmy, which to a huge corporation like that is huge. It means they’re starting to take it seriously.
Good. Let them sweat.
Sorry you had your account taken away because of it. I’ll use my throwaways now to evangelize it.
They absolutely know about us, probably from a long time ago, but especially in this past week, with lemmy getting posted everywhere.
They’ve done an amazing job at burning their community. They think 3rd party apps are only used by super nerds (or at least many of the people I’ve talked to do), but I think they forgot who provides most of the content.
Well, bots now, but good content usually came from the super nerds
Sometimes I do get a bit doomerist about it. If reddit is to be believed, they claim something like < 20% of people use old.reddit, or mobile apps. That seems incredibly low to me, but I must admit most of the people who I encounter IRL that use reddit don’t know about old reddit, RES, or other apps.
These are traffic statistics from r/privatelife from the past 12 months. This is the most favourable scenario for third party Reddit client users.
The reality is, third party users and old.reddit.com users are a minority and are easiest to ditch for Reddit as a company. And they will no longer care for us, so its best to prioritise our interests just like they are.
You’d be surprised. For example, on r/electricvehicles, one of the subs I used to moderate, the majority of our community members were on mobile platforms, more than those on PC even though I am personally more on PC.
Which is why they’ve been waiting, I’m sure they kept the numbers updated to know what critical mass they thought they needed to be able to chop off this part of their userbase. Ignoring that this part was also the ones who are their most dedicated users, there for the longest amount of time.
I think it has more to do with timing on business/IPO decisions. They’ve decided their plan forward, and they’ve decided that they can afford to lose some users.
I think they’ve also convinced themselves that most people using 3rd party apps or old.reddit will just get in line, because they won’t want to actually leave the platform.
I wonder how that’ll work out for them.
I’m sure there’s a report in someone’s email of the psychology behind it, projected people who will comply and how many people will be projected to actually leave.
Agree, this is certainly a calculated move.
I have a feeling that if you really crunch Reddit’s numbers, the content that provides the most engagement and revenue is NSFW content. Reddit is one of the only large social media websites that allows NSFW and the subreddit system makes it much easier to categorize and find content than Twitter, so there are a massive number of invisible users who do not use the site for anything except NSFW, which is also why it’s specifically targeted in the new API policy. Long-term, technically knowledgeable users who produce high-quality content are not nearly as financially exploitable as the mass of users who use Reddit as a NSFW directory and who have no alternative to migrate to.
Plus, the majority of active Reddit users are non-technical “normies” who joined Reddit after hearing about it from trends like the GameStop stock. Those users use the official app and have no idea what an API is, so they don’t care and will continue to use Reddit.
Reddit is so damn hypocritical here. They are successful because Digg buried itself doing shit like this. They literally got success as a result of another company doing the speedrun-your-platform-into-oblivion playbook that they are now following themselves. Look in a mirror, idiots, you’ve become exactly that which was the downfall of your competition some 13 years ago.
deleted by creator
Things are definitely starting to get weird there, my account is starting to act up, not fetching posts, just had a popup and it went away in chat for “Cannot get info on banned users”.
It’s Monday morning. Something tells me some new directives came down from on high about competitor talk.
I just had the new UI forced upon my account, and the whole site hiccuped for like 15 minutes through the process. Multiple log-outs, unable to upvote or comment, then suddenly bam, new UI, and everything went back to… not broken.
I’m advertising Lemmy on every popular post on my 11 year old account… I’m already through the painful part of the breakup, and have moved on to better things. Go ahead and ban me Reddit
Just got banned from a meme sub for making a meme about moving to Lemmy… Even tho the sub is participating in the blackout. Go figure.
I would suspect that’s the admin’s doing, but I wouldn’t actually know
Guess Reddit admins can ban anyone even if they don’t moderate that specific subreddit.
Many mods are narrow-minded as well. Argentina subreddit was a perfect example.
Have you seen the drama over at r/sysadmin? TBH whether Reddit survives this or not (I’m assuming it will), I’d rather be over here. TBH the smaller user base is actually a plus.
Reddit permanently suspended all of my accounts because I said Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a cunt for not retiring when she had the chance. R/politics banned that account, and then a few weeks later I’d forgotten about that incident and commented in another post from a different account. That’s when reddit permabanned all of my accounts.
I’ve been on reddit since August 2008 when Randal Monroe published this xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/477/
Bonus link: https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/71v7z/typewriter_xkcd/
15 fucking years on that site and they ban all my accounts and devices, then third party apps, porn, and who knows what else. Good riddance.
@redditrefugee @Archit bit of a rude word to call her, especially in the US if you’re not from here and your culture is a lot more relaxed on that word. So while it’s gross that they’ve banned you I’m kind of not surprised that kind of language would attract that kind of attention.
Except the mods on Reddit don’t mind at all if you insult conservatives or Republicans with much worse rhetoric. In fact. they encourage it.
I just ran powerdelete suit on my reddit accounts and replaced all of my posts/comments with ones urging users to join lemmy. I was going to wait until July 1rst but if reddit is going to get that serious, then so am I. I am OUT!
Reddit deserves this.
I remember I used to fuck with and annoy the shit out of all the users on r/politics. I would make sure I commented something like “Biden 2020 WOO!,” and see my comment escalated all the way to the top of the thread. Then I’d wait about 24/48 hours, go back and edit it to something, like praising Donald Trump, and the comments I got back where hilarious. People demanding I got banned. People asking how my comment got to the top of the page. People claiming I was a bot account that paid for upvotes. It was hilarious to watch in real time.
**sees icon on Tretiak’s comment here showing that this comment has been edited**
Hmmmm
how do you do this?
Dang. I should have done this. I just had it edit and then delete. Oh well. :D
If this is true, this is probably an anti competitive practice and you can report it to regulation authorities in the US and EU, you might want to consult some non profit that deals with open source and free software for legal advice.
you can report it to regulation authorities in the US
Funny you think the US cares.
Louis Rossmann’s lobbying videos have made me lose all of my trust in the integrity of the US government tbh
Things are probably not as black and white as that, The US have fined corporations before for anti competitive practices.
Sure, but the fines seem like just a business expense for most of those corps tbh, small enough that the profit easily outweighs the fine.
We can try to send an email to FSFE and though them we may be able to reach some more visibility. Also, there is a large list of journalists that already use and support the Fediverse, some of them write for big newspapers. Another thing could be directly contacting your MPs, but the communication in that case is different I guess
“Spam” reeks of weak horseshit justification for reddit’s actions here. Lots of people x-post all sorts of things all the time. They were itching for a legitimate-sounding reason to ban you and they just reached for the first thing they could find using the loosest possible definition.
It is. Have you seen any of those onlyfans girls Reddit accounts? They post the same photo over 100x per day to all different subs. If you scroll down their profile, you can scroll for a good solid 5 minutes before you reach 7 days ago.
This isn’t about spam. Spam gets caught in filters. Spammers get shadow banned.
That explicitly violates the spamming and self promotion rules.
Meanwhile, reddit admins:
___In reality, its whatever causes Reddit to look worse for their upcoming IPO.
And the real issue here is that this lying and deception is at the root of Reddit’s core values.
https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/
" (Cofounder) Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity. Yes, you read that right. Reddit — a site that values a fair and open democratic process to determine worthy content and police itself — sleeps soundly on a bed of lies. "
Lol thank you for that article. I never knew reddit started out by astroturfing their own site. I’m sure they’d probably stopped doing that by the time I joined, but with that, various leadership/admin scandals in the time since, and now gaslighting third party app devs/users, I’m pretty much done with their shit. I might browse communities that haven’t gone another direction yet, but I don’t think I’m going to contribute anything over there anymore.
Yeah I had all my accounts permabanned last week myself, including a porn account, 2 camped accounts, and a 10y old occult account. All gone. They also shadowban all from my previous IP.
I also had a rather public blowout as well previously, about very similar issues. All it takes is a few dozen people to report you and permaban city here you come. And no, you’re not told why either.
Im done with feeding anything to reddit: including content, comments, or even basic usage/telemetry. I can surf reddiv via cached data via archive.org or google cache.
(and yes, I could defeat their IP and invasive browser/OS identification. No, I hope they die. edit: they as in reddit, not individuals)
Yeah. I’m pretty sure I saw some of OP’s posts (it’s what led me to sign up here) and they were helpful. I think the only thing considered spammy is maybe some of the crossposting of the same information, but it was useful information (for me at least).
I’m not at all surprised Reddit is doing this sort of thing. They’ve been known for this, and the timing was ripe for another one of their trademark iron fist overreaches.
This means they’re scared. It means we’re winning.
Meh. It might just mean they’re annoyed and forward thinking. Better to stop talk of this early before it becomes something they actually need to be afraid of.
… and forward thinking.
Let me go ahead and stop you right there.
LOL!
(btw, the gif isn’t showing up in your comment. I had to go to source and copy/paste the url of the file)
Damnit lol. I’ll just post the link.
You are right, that’s a great way of looking at this. They are indeed scared, desperate, pathetically desperate.
Sorry to hear that, I can hardly imagine how that feels. Well, their loss, our win.
All hail Lemmy. I really hope it gets the critical mass it needs after these shenanigans.
Welp, I wuppose now is a good a time as any to delete my entire reddit accounts histories. Fuck em.
fuck reddit. lemmy ftw!
